Mud Creek lived up to its name. A massive slipout at a months-old landslide along Big Sur's coast buried Highway 1 under a new 40-foot layer of rock and dirt.

A swath of the hillside gave way at Mud Creek on Saturday night, said Colin Jones, a spokesman with the California Department of Transportation. Crystal blue ocean waters below turned brown from millions of cubic yards of dirt and rocks.

CalTrans already had closed Highway 1 at Mud Creek to repair buckled pavement and remove debris from an earlier landslide triggered by powerful winter storms. Authorities removed work crews from the area last week after realizing that saturated soil was increasingly unstable, Jones said.

No one was injured by Saturday's slide.

Big Sur has its own unique geology, said Dan Carl, a district director for the California Coastal Commission.

"A lot of Big Sur is moving; you just don't see it," Carl said.

Even though the sun is shining and storms are gone, "it doesn't mean the ground isn't shifting now based on what happened over the winter," Jones said.

Mother Nature showed just how true that is.

"Now it's covering 10 times as much," Jones said of the newly deposited rock.

"The slide went from bad to worse over the weekend," the Monterey County Sheriff's Office said.

Worse, meaning, the Mud Creek landslide is now one of the largest landslides of California's recent history.

The slipout may have even torn Highway 1's lanes down with it, CalTrans spokeswoman Susana Cruz said.

Before Saturday, "We had hoped to shore it up, like Paul's (Slide), and open (Highway 1) mid to late June," Cruz said.

"Now with this, we have no idea. We had geologists look at it yesterday, and today we should have a better idea of what the fix will be," Cruz said Tuesday.

Mud Creek landslide

State road officials plan to wait for the immediate slide danger to pass before bringing construction crews back to strengthen the hillside and rebuild.

Mud Creek is located 37 miles south of Big Sur, eight miles north of the Monterey County / San Luis Obispo County line, and 25 miles north of Hearst Castle.

The Highway 1 drive from Carmel to Hearst Castle is a major tourist draw, attracting visitors to serene groves of redwoods, beaches and the highway's dramatic oceanside scenery.

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Mud Creek landslide

But the rough winter closed many stretches of Highway 1, including at Pfeiffer Canyon. A landslide there caused Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge to buckle so badly that the entire bridge had to be demolished, cutting off half of Big Sur from the rest of the Central Coast.